Go to any stock image site and you'll find hundreds of vaguely similar photoshopped or rendered images for sale. You'll find plenty for free as well.

But the point is this guy created it; he owns it. It doesn't matter whether anyone else thinks it has any artistic merit, or whether they believe his claim for how much it cost him to create, or whether they think he was a dumbass for not doing it with 3d animation; it's his.

So I think he's entitled to try and stop people like the BBC and CBS using it as a free stock image to illustrate unrelated stories.

For what it's worth, it looks to me like he really did hire a studio, set up 500 TVs, tune them in and probably take scores of photos to get the perfect one. Nice job.

They cite headquarters specifically, not physical location of the servers hosting the database. So if the registry merged with or was taken over by a company in a different state (let's say Virginia since someone mentioned it above) and its headquarters was no longer in California, then all those hapless domain name owners could suddenly find themselves subject to a different jurisdiction - even if all the registry's employees and all the same servers stayed there in the same building in California, just because somewhere else was designated as the HQ.
From the court ruling:
[9] Because VeriSign has its headquarters in the Northern
District of California, the district court had quasi in rem jurisdiction over the domain names registered with VeriSign for purposes of appointing a receiver to assist in executing a judgment against the owner of the names.